Yukon.ca is the Government of Yukon’s main information and services website. It has been live since a redesign and rebranding completed in 2018.

The purpose of the redesign was to build a website for citizens to access the goverment's programs, services and information. We moved away from a website designed around government silos and we moved toward a one-government approach. Citizens don't often know which department manages a service so we got them involved in user research we conducted to make sure Yukon.ca would work for them.

Read about the card sort, tree testing and user testing we conducted. 

Why do a UX assessment on Yukon.ca now?

Staff routinely monitor user feedback and website analytics and when we find there's an issue, we implement a solution and we retest to make sure we've addressed it. 

We have decided to take a different approach and have a third party complete this comprehensive assessment. We did this for 2 reasons.

1. To make sure the recommendations were as unbiased as possible. To do this we wanted to work with an expert, or team of experts not familar with the website, but with experience working on government websites in a UX capacity; and
2. To create capacity within the project team to approach the assessement using a mix of user research techniques. This is so we can get a complete picture of the current state of the user experience on Yukon.ca.

What we want to get out of this assessment

Since the website launched in 2018 – it has more than doubled in size. The goal of this assessment is to make sure the website is still meeting the needs of citizens and other people who use it. We want to identify and understand:

• what is working for citizens;
• what is not working for citizens; and
• what services, programs and information citizens expect to get on Yukon.ca.

Project team

Before diving into the plan – I thought it might be helpful to have an overview of the project team and their roles. 

This work is led by the eServices for Citizens unit. We are responsible for the government's public-facing platforms and user research. Team members are the Yukon.ca product owner, the web architect for the website and the user experience manager.

We are partnering with our digital communications colleagues at the Executive Council Office (ECO). ECO is the service owner of Yukon.ca and they own the content strategy for the website. Their team consists of their online communications managers and manager of digital communications. 

Government of Yukon Web Advisory Committee members will be involved in the next steps.

The plan to conduct the assessment

We landed on 5 UX techniques we felt would give us the most complete picture of the current UX state of Yukon.ca. We also asked the vendor to ensure the process is repeatable so we can do the work internally moving forward.

UX techniques used in this assessment

• User feedback analysis
• Cross-jurisdictional analysis
• Analytics analysis
• Heuristics analysis
• Tree test (editor's note – based on what were learning from the initial research, we pivoted and decided usability testing and user interviews would give us more meaningful information, this replaced a tree test we had originally planned to do).

What we learned from this assessment

This section is a summary of what we learned from each piece of research as the project progressed.

User feedback analysis

The vendor focused on all negative, or "thumbs down" user feedback submitted in 2023. Given the project timeline we did not look at the positive feedback because we wanted to focus on identifying and understanding issues people were having so we could focus on improving them. 

Based on the analysis of negative feedback submissions we:

• have a good overview of people’s expectations and the pain points they encountered on the website;
• have defined groupings and themes to categorize the feedback; and
• can use these to measure improvement once we implement solutions.

Read about the details of this user feedback analysis >>

Cross jursidictional anaysis

For this part of the research project the vendor compared Yukon.ca with the main government websites for Nova Scotia, British Columbia and the Northwest Territories. They focused on:

• content quality;
• how well the brand was applied;
• information architecture;
• navigation and search; and
• translation.

They looked at Yukon.ca’s home page, category and sub-category pages and some task pages.

The vendor found Yukon.ca does a good job of presenting content to a diverse range of user groups including: citizens, businesses and organizations, travellers and researchers. The website categories were comparable to the other jurisdictions.

They identified the following areas of improvement:

• finding a balance between text, icons and images;
• improving cues for context like summaries on category and sub-category pages;
• improving search; and
• improving where and how we present contact information on pages.

Read about the details of this cross-jurisdictional analysis >>

Analytics analysis

The vendor focused on 2023 analytics for the website. They found the analytics insights validate what we’ve started to learn from the user feedback and cross-jurisdiction analyses.

• All prominent user feedback themes are reflected in the high-level analytics.
• Employment is a top theme in the analytics that is not reflected in the user feedback data (except where it intersects with immigration)
• News and updates from the government on current topics are important for users.
• Analytics show “contact” related info is not easily findable (in search and going to main contact page)

Read about the details of this analytis analysis >>

Heuristics analysis

The goal with this part of the project is for the vendor to use established UX heuristics to evaluate the user experience on Yukon.ca in an unbiased manner so we can build on the things we are doing well, and address any issues they uncover.

The heuristics analysis was helpful and allowed us to further dial in areas of Yukon.ca we can improve.

Read about the details of the heuristics analysis >>

Usability testing and user interviews

Our original plan was to run a tree test but as the project evolved, the vendor wanted to observe people completing tasks and have the flexibility to ask follow-up questions to better understand their thought processes. 

Participants struggled to complete around half of the tasks tested. The vendor followed up in these instances to round out their understanding of the issue. 

People try search first and then navigate the website. Although we’ve made improvements to the Yukon.ca search – this round of testing showed the search results are news release and document forward and it was challenging for users to get to the information pages.

We found that we need to pay more attention to the category and sub-category pages so they are more navigable. When Yukon.ca launched – the primary focus was to write content pages that would show up well in search because we knew most of the website traffic came from search engines. We succeeded with that, but now we must improve the navigability of these pages. 

The top task buttons on the category and sub-category pages must be relevant to content on the page. Landing pages on Yukon.ca have a section for top tasks at the top of the page. This is meant to show people the top things people want to do in these categories and sub-categoriese to save them from having to scroll down the page to find them. Given many of these pages have multiple sub-categories – we now understand that we need to rethink how we present top tasks. 

We need to tackle UX issues with the home page sliders and to look for ways to present content to audiences in multiple ways that compliment one another. This is something we've come across in other usability research we've conducted. We've tried to mitigate it in a few different ways, but we haven't been quite successful.

Read about the details of the usability test/user interviews >>

Next steps

Once the vendor completes all of the user research they will share their findings with the project team. We plan to have a workshop to:

• Review the findings/recommendations together so we can test and validate further if needed.
• Prioritize issues based on the following.
  • Our ability to do the work in house (simple fixes, no development work) and timing with Drupal 10 migration. The team can make content updates, but are not doing anything requiring development work as we are in the midst of migrating from Drupal 7 to 10. We want to avoid doing any work we'd have to redo in a few months. 
  • Impact on the user. Issues that prevent people from accessing information or a service are high priority.
• Present the findings and initial prioritization to the Web Advisory Committee.
• Hold Yukon.ca roadmap sessions with committee members to create alignment and map out work that aligns with user needs and government priorities for the next 2 to 3 years. 
• Publish the Yukon.ca roadmap online.

For questions about this research project you can comment on this post or email eservices@yukon.ca.